Patients with a life-limiting illness frequently experience pain and other symptoms. It is important to pay close attention when medication therapy is used to manage these symptoms. Occasionally, practitioners need to be creative in selecting, dosing, administering, and discontinuing medications at the end of life because of the patient’s changing health care needs.
In the video below, Dr. Kathryn Walker and Dr. Lynn McPherson of the University of Maryland discuss the role of the pharmacist in the hospital and hospice settings, as well as a few of their favorite medication tips and tricks in end-of-life care.
This article offers practical end-of-life medication tips including, but not limited to, medication administration; guidance on how to increase and decrease doses; medication selection for difficult to-treat patients; alternative dosage formulations; routes of medication administration; debridement medication regimens; and appropriate drug therapy selection. Dr. McPherson and Dr. Walker discuss how to deal with changing the goals of care for your dying patients and their families. They offer suggestions on how to integrate some helpful end-of-life medication tips into your practice.
*For a PDF of the full article, click on the link to the left of this introduction.